Fanning the flame of God’s calling

Personal Profile

Four countries and nine years of preparation later, Bro. Ryan Holovlasky CSsR made his perpetual vows to the order of Redemptorists in March 2021. “It was worth the wait,” Bro. Ryan tells The Irish Catholic, explaining that he always felt “that flame burning that God was calling me to the priesthood”.

Bro. Ryan spent his childhood in South Africa. His family was religious, without being overly so, he says. But “my friend and I became altar servers at the age of seven and we said when we grow up, we’re going to be priests”.

“He’s now a pilot and somewhere in my heart I knew there was that flame burning that God was calling me for the priesthood,” Bro. Ryan continues. “I was very involved in my parish as a server and worked with the local archbishop that I grew up with. I was very involved in that side and it was something I felt at home with.

Bro. Ryan was in the Middle East working in the aviation industry, a career which led him to over a hundred countries, he says”

“When I worked in the Middle East, I had friends and most of them had no religion and I remember having a discussion with a friend from New Zealand. We were talking and I said I think I’m going to become a priest. I remember at first she looked at me and then she said, you saying that makes me think of a salmon.

“You’re going to be the salmon because they go upstream. You’re going against everything society is telling you. But I know you can do it. That gave me that strength, that push to take that jump to say I’ll try it. Because that’s all we can do is try and see how God’s at work in it all.”

Bro. Ryan was in the Middle East working in the aviation industry, a career which led him to over a hundred countries, he says. It wasn’t until an experience he had praying before an image of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Sydney that he made the final decision to take the plunge.

“There was always an icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help in our home and when I was in Australia I was sitting in the Sydney Cathedral praying and found myself in front of the icon of Perpetual Help and I thought in that moment, what am I doing in my life,” Bro. Ryan says. “I can feel God calling me to the priesthood, do I want to diocesan route or the religious route? Mary was speaking to me in that moment, and I thought well – I was 25 at that time, let’s try and see what God’s saying to me.”

Redemptorists

“I got in contact with the vocations director for the Redemptorists, who I knew, and started the journey there. The work with the poor and abandoned, I felt especially a calling to that. Going to the margins and working with people who are in need. Not always in poverty, in the sense of poor, but in other ways as well. I got to do that in my formation. I worked in the Canon Law side of the Church and worked in the archdiocese of New York with marriage annulments, child abuse.”

Bro. Ryan joined the Redemptorists in 2012 and started in St Joseph’s Monastery, Dundalk. After two years studying in Maynooth, he was sent to Toronto to complete his novitiate, before heading to Chicago and San Antonio. It was only last year that he returned to Ireland, where in March he was ordained to the diaconate. Since then, he has been kept extremely busy, sampling different aspects of the Redemptorist’s works.

“As Redemptorists, we have a number of communities around, I was working with Redemptorist Communications, our publishing house,” Bro. Ryan begins. “We had a book launch of Jim Deeds’ book the week after I was ordained. We have a parish on the Antrim Road called St Gerard’s, so I was trying to settle in there helping them with a backlog of baptisms, and with a few funerals that were coming in.

“Then Clonard monastery as well, I was assigned to that community, working in peace and reconciliation. That all kept me busy. Because everything, especially peace and reconciliation, has become online stuff – I was trying to keep up to date interviewing various presbyterian ministers. Then there was the big riots in Belfast, so we were involved with that with the bishop.”

The Redemptorists have offered to help the archdiocese for two years until they can find something to replace them”

The future for Bro. Ryan will provide a new challenge for him – the work of a parish priest. After his ordination to the priesthood, which will take place in early September, he and the Redemptorists in Dundalk will temporarily manage a formerly Marist parish.

“We have a parish in Dundalk and the Marists had a parish next door to us called Holy Family,” Bro. Ryan explains. “The Redemptorists have offered to help the archdiocese for two years until they can find something to replace them. It’s going to be part of our parish and we’ll be working together as a team between the two.

“They asked if I would be interested in doing that and I said yes. Parish work will be the main. We used to do missions around the country. I was assigned to the mission team when I came back, but that never happened because of lockdown. What that holds I don’t know because we will only take over in September. There’s a team of four of us between the two parishes anyway. Parish work is new for me so I’m looking forward to what that entails.”